JLY 1976 AMERICNS WASHINGTON, F.D.R, THE WEALTH OF NE DOLLAR LIBERTARIAN REVOLUTION AND THE CONVOYS NATIONS: AN INTERVIEW

MU9RAY N. RQTHBARQ ROBERT BRAKEMAN WITH ADAM SMITH

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mPEs \vm WILLIAM MARINA

Just what is it we are celebrating with the Bicentennial? With a few notable exceptions, much of the reality and significance of the American Revolu- tion seems to have escaped the American people and

William Marina is a building contractor, is President of the International Foundation for Gifted Children, and teaches in Florida. This year he is Liberty Fund Research Scholar at the Institute for Humane Studies, Menlo Park, Ca. Among the publications he has written, coauthored, or helped edit are American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro, Egalitarianism and Empire, and News of the Nation. Much of this article is excerpted from his forthcoming The American Revolution as a People's War.

a large segment of the historical profession, judging from what has been published during the Bicenten- nial.

Was the American Revolution, for example, a people's war? Last year in an article in REASON (June 1975), I pointed out that the widespread idea that it was a minority movement is based on a misreading of a letter from John Adams to James Lloyd, dated January 1831, located in volume 10 of Adam's Works. A close reading makes i t clear that Adams was discussing American opinion about the French Revolution in the 1790's when he wrote of a third being for the Revolution, a third against it, and a third "lukewarm."

I do not claim credit for the Bxpose of that

28 reason july 1976

misreading, which is found in numerous books dating back a t least to 1902. The error was first pointed out in 1954 in The American Revolution by John R. Alden, who was cited by R. R. Palmer five years later in his The Age of the Democratic Revolution, and the error was discussed in detail by Herbert Aptheker in The American Revolution a year after Palmer's book.

Yet in the 1970's, a t the approach of and into the celebration of the Bicentennial, the repetition and perpetuation of the minority myth, based upon the misreading of Adam's letter, continues unabated. To cite just a few sources: the colonial historian Darrett B. Rutman mentioned it in a book in 1971, as did the historian Oscar Handlin in an article in The American Scholar the same year; the next year it was noted by Daniel Ellsberg in his book, by Alistair Cooke in his television program "America" and the book of the same name, and by the conservative social critic Irving Kristol in a presentation; it was reiterated in 1974 by Thomas H. Greene in a book on comparative revolutions, in 1975 by Sydney B. Harris in several columns; and just recently by the historian Page Smith, whose magnificent two-volume work A New Age Now Begins is otherwise dedicated to demon- strating the American Revolution as a majority movement (Smith avoids an apparent contradiction by suggesting Adams' estimate referred to the begin- ning of the Revolution).

I hope that lengthy list, just for the 1970's, has not bored the reader, but I thought it necessary to establish the pervasiveness of the misreading of the letter. A very large number of intellectuals apparently find something very appealing in the notion that social change is caused by a minority. A variation of the minority theme, found in the work of British historians such as W. E. H. Lecky and Eric Robson, admits an American majority but sees it as very much manipulated by a clever group of leaders.

We will skip over the questionable methodology of all those who have cited the Adams letter. Common sense ought to lead one to ask what kind of Gallup Poll Adams had upon which to base such an estimate, why it was better than the estimates of other participants, and how that estimate could be recon- ciled with others by Adam indicating a clear Ameri- can majority.

A DANGEROUS MYTH With the misreading of the Adams letter out of the

way, the question still remains whether the American Revolution was a majority movement, and it i s a very important one. If, for example, the Founding Fathers had thought they were only a minority it would be difficult to avoid viewing them as rather hypocritical, for they constantly spoke of the will of the majority as second only to natural law.

The fascination of the minority interpretation is closely linked with what must be regarded as the other significant, and much debated, question about the Revolution-Was it a true social revolution or

merely a colonial rebellion? For a long time now an anti-revolutionary outlook has been growing in Amer- ica, reflected in the historiography of the American Revolution. At the heart of that outlook is the arrogance of power that some of the Founding Fathers such as John Adams criticized as the essence of empire. Since late in the 19th century there has been ample evidence in the American experience to demonstrate the growth of that attitude. A number of the antistatists of the Old Right spoke out against this trend, and I have written a t length about it, most recently in REASON (Feb. 1976). Suffice it to say here that the notion'of a minority having effected the American Revolution meshes nicely with the idea that the Imperial Republic ought to be run by a group of policymakers who, in their wisdom about "world order," have a better sense about what is good for the American people than the people themselves.

Given that antirevolutionary, elitist attitude, in a century filled with violent and radical revolutionary upheaval, it is perhaps natural that some should seek to find in the American Revolution an exception to these recent struggles. Hence the interpretation of the American Revolution as only a colonial rebellion to protect existing American rights from the encroach- ment of British power.

There is much wisdom in the observation that, like all historical occurrences, the American Revolution was a unique event. That insight, however, can become quite divorced from reality if it obscures the ways in which the Revolution was similar to a number of such upheavals. The American patriot David Ramsay was talking about a "people's war" long before Mao Tse-tung. American revolutionary Committees of Safety were extracting "recanta- tions'' and "confessions" after lengthy sessions with individuals who expressed doubts about the struggle decades before "brainwashing " and "coercive persua- sion" were carried to their logical conclusions by Communist revolutionists and psychologists. And George Washington was writing about an American strategy to "protract" the conflict many years before Communist tacticians worked out a plan for "pro- tracted conflict."

In short, one need not go to the writings of Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Chd Guevara, or Vo Nguyen Giap nor study the revolutions with which they were associ- ated to learn about the principles of revolutionary warfare. The events of the American Revolution are filled with examples of the discovery and working out of the essentials of those principles. Note, for example, this assessment by Washington's young aide, Alexander Hamilton, hardly a radical: "To avoid a general engagement" it was sometimes necessary to "give up objects of the first importance." To the question, "What i s to hinder the enemy from carrying every important point and ruining us?" he replied: "Our hopes are not placed in any particular city, or spot of ground, but preserving a good army, furnished with proper necessities, to take advantage of favor-

july 1976 reason 29

able opportunities, and to waste and defeat the enemy by piecemeal." Could any of our 20th-century writers on "guerrilla" or "counterinsurgency" warfare have stated the strategy more clearly?

WHAT MAKES A PEOPLE'S WAR? The sociology of revolution, of late, has received

considerable attention. In the light of recent experi- ences, unlike earlier studies such as Crane Brinton's classic The Anatomy of Revolution, several newer books on revolution link i t s success to guerrilla war and to the participation of the mass of the people,

Insufficient attention has been given, however, to what might be called the basis of legitimacy of a society. Individuals conceptualize through a world- view, a definition of reality a t the center of which are some assumptions about human nature and about the basis of values that give the social order a degree of cohesion or legitimacy. A paradigm (the current "in" word) is really a subset within this larger worldview. Thus a shift from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican theory in astronomy is a paradigm shift that need not disturb another paradigm concerning molecules. On the other hand, one can have only one worldview, and, as I have suggested in Egalitarianism and Empire, though

Perpetuation of the minority myth, based upon the misreading of the

Adams letter, continues unabated.

they can be combined in a hierarchy, there are only three sources of value-supernatural, natural, and positive law-from which one can choose to construct the core of a worldview.

In considering whether a given upheaval is only a rebellion or a true social revolution, l i t t le effort has been made to define exactly what is meant by the latter. While the degree of social and economic change, the turnover of the elite, and the extent of violence are all important aspects, I would suggest that the most fundamental criterion is whether there i s a shift in the basis of legitimacy between the old regime and the new.

What really characterizes a people's war is that the ideology of legitimacy is the matrix within which the military struggle is waged. The most critical period in any revolution, therefore, is the point a t which the great mass of the people shifts i t s legitimacy from the value base of the old regime. People's war, whether through popular support of a regular army, partisan units, or guerrilla bands, is simply the military effort to establish the institutions embodying the new legitimacy.

THE HEART OF REVOLUTION That subtle shift in legitimacy is the key aspect of

the sociology of revolution. Unless it can reestablish i t s legitimacy, no amount of territory captured or number of battles won can ever result in a victorious return of the old regime.

Modern counterinsurgency warfare has too often concentrated upon the military aspect of the struggle, but that is not the way of successful revolutionists. The insurgents' regular army forces can be broken into partisan units, defeated until there are only guerrilla groups left, and many of those groups isolated and destroyed, but the insurgency will not be defeated unless the legitimacy it has for the mass of the people is displaced. That, and nothing else, is what is meant by victory. The dynamics of that shift, before any real overthrow of the old regime is accomplished, is crucial to social revolution.

Revolutions are an example of social change a t i t s maximum. The great question that has occupied students of both social change and revolution is, Why, and under what circumstances, does a questioning of the old regime take place? In Egalitarianism and Empire I sought to develop a theory of social change, which applies not only to revolution, but also to the American history, where, as Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to point out in detail, equality was a significant factor. I suggested that civilizations tend to pass through a cycle from equality, which gener- ates envy, to egalitarianism, aFd finally to empire. Without being deliberately alliterative, I would now add several additional "E'S,'' so that the whole syndrome might be described: expansion, equality, envy, egalitarianism, empire, entropy, and extinction.

From the standpoint of social revolution, what is significant is that in any society there is a constant tension-which can be thought of as a triangle- between the beneficiaries of the inequalities of the old order, those who are striving to increase equality of opportunity and before the law, and those who desire egalitarian leveling of status and wealth. Expan- sion, whether of the market or of territory, softens the sense of inequality, offers greater opportunity, and tends to assuage demands for egalitarianism.

If, however, expansion breeds a certain psychol- ogy, so too does contraction of the system. People become more cognizant of inequalities, and those who are dissatisfied gravitate toward either equality or egalitarianism, with a demand for the former often masking a real desire for the latter. Thus it was that Tocqueville saw envy as the driving force in the rampant egalitarianism that characterized the French Revolution. With these brief comments about social change, revolution, and. people's war in mind, let us examine the American Revolution.

SEARCHING FOR NEW LEGITIMACY The American Revolution cannot be correctly

understood outside of the context of a lingering debate that had surfaced in the English Revolution and continued during that almost century and a quarter that comprised much of the colonial period

32 reason july 1976

of American history. At issue was what constitutes a good society. It was an age in which religion, and this was true of the American Revolution as well, played an important role.

As the rise of national states challenged the supremacy of a Christian religious community, monarchs such as Henry V l l l attempted to work out a synthesis between the various sources of law or value. In supplanting Thomas More's belief in super- natural as superior to positive, s tat is t law, Henry did not seek to eliminate other sources of value but to develop a hierarchy in which it was "natural" that the king, as head of the state, was by divine ordination God's choice to rule. This effort to make nation and church coincide could hardly satisfy those who, seeing sin and corruption among those comprising the state, wished either to purify the church (Puritans) or separate church from state (Separatist).

Without going into the social, economic, and political intricacies of the English Revolution, we can see that the debate involved equality and egalitarian- ism. That debate about the nature of a Christian commonwealth took place around the campfires of the New Model Army. The more conservative mem- bers, the leaders, of the revolutionary coalition wer.e not so much concerned with equality as a general principle as they were anxious to gain access to that organized system of coercive inequality known as the State. The equalitarian position was argued by lead- ers, such as John Lilburne, of that group known as Levellers, to the everlasting confusion of future historians, for their program was essentially libertari- an. The Diggers, a much smaller group led by Gerard Winstanley, took an egalitarian, socialist position. Even before the restoration of the King, it was clear the Revolution had faltered far short of the equality of opportunity and before the law desired by the libertarian Levellers,

During the next century, including the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, there was a continuing debate about the nature of the English Constitution and the relationship between the King and the Parliament. The Whigs, especially that group represented by pamphleteers such as Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, were in many ways the heirs to the equalitarian ideas of the Levellers.

As might be expected, that debate and aspects of the alternatives were carried to the New World and were reflected in the English efforts a t colonization. What linked, for example, some of the Puritan leaders in early Massachusetts with proprietors in the Caro- linas was a belief in a rather rigid hierarchical system of inequality. Even less successful in the New World were those who envisaged the ideal commonwealth as a society of leveling communism. After several years of fulility that "noble experiment" was dropped both a t Plymouth and a t Jamestown.

Perhaps the most fruitful way to view the whole American colonial experience is to see it as a number of continuing struggles, progressing a t a different pace

depending on the colony, between those who wished to establish some version of a feudal, hierarchical system of inequality and those favoring equality of opportunity and before the law. The former argued for a strong, positive government, while the latter wanted the State either limited or eliminated. (Re- cent research by Rowland Berthoff and John M. Murrin suggesting a feudal revival in the 18th century raises some question about the strength of the equalitarians. It is probably safe to conclude, how- ever, that political participation was on the whole extended and that some additional mobility existed in that some able persons were coopted into the existing system.)

The continuing struggles surfaced most obviously in the rebellions that shook many of the colonies before and during the Glorious Revolution. Though he does not put it in the context sketched above, Bernard Bailyn's The Origins of American Politics offers a great deal of evidence to support such an interpretive framework.

Finally, there i s the relationship between the colonies and the Mother Country. At this level also, the debate would in the end focus around inequality versus equality. As early as the 1670's some British

The American Patriot David Ramsay was talking about a ''people's war"

long before Ma0 Tse-tung.

policymakers conceived that the colonies, especially New England might someday offer an economic and political challenge to England, The policy of "salu- tary neglect" operated for a good part of the 18th century, postponing a confrontation with that prob- lem, but it began to change when, after the Great War for Empire in the mid-I700's, British mercantilist policymakers sought to fully implement the potential of the system.

THE STAMP ACT CRISIS The British effort in 1765 to collect a revenue

from the colonies through the sale of stamps, to be required for numerous items and transactions, coming as it did on the heels of several other problems, threw the whole system into disarray. Even that obnoxious piece of legislation was an effort to curtail the thrust toward greater equality of opportunity. The tax to enter college or the bar was to be much higher than in England. Thomas Whately, who drew up the bill, acknowledged "they were raised . . . considerably in order to keep mean persons out of .those situations in life which they disgrace."

The massive protest in America made some strange bedfellows, ranging from Samuel Adams, through more conservative elements, to members of

july 1976 reason 33

the British system such as Thomas Hutchinson. That dilemma, or "ordeal" as Bailyn calls it, of Tory- Loyalists such as Hutchinson is familiar to anyone who has studied colonial rebellions. Marxists use the term "comprador" to describe those natives who link their fortunes to that of the imperial power. William H. Nelson's little book The American Tory is particu- larly good in exploring the quandary of such men when the tensions inherent in the inequalities of the colonial system come to the fore. They are truly the men in the middle.

"Organized mobs" and riots, Sons of Liberty, and a colonial Stamp Act Congress were al l a part of negating the act, but the actual nullification came in the unanimous refusal to buy or use the stamps. As England backed down, some conservatives were frightened by the destruction of some of the riots and protests, such as those by tenants in New York opposing abuses of the quasi-feudal system. William Prendergast, the leader of these Levellers (note the name harking back to the libertarians of the previous century), warned that the same arguments used against stamps certainly must have validity elsewhere as well.

The Stamp Act initiated over a decade of debate

British policymakers never understood that the Americans had almost unanimously united behind

the idea that they would not submit to taxation without representation.

~~ ~~ ~ ~

among Americans about the British Constitution and the place of the colonies within it. In essence it was a discussion of the basic legitimacy of the system, and it certainly was not clarified by the fact that a debate over the Constitution had been going on in England itself. What British policymakers after the Stamp Act protest never understood was that the Americans had almost unanimously united behind the idea that they would not submit to taxation without representation. In the several confrontations that were to follow, the Americans never wavered from that view, which is a t root an aspect of equality before the law. In the debate the Americans were clarifying in their own minds the basic legitimacy of their beliefs-a very arduous and often slow process-and heatedly discuss- ing the proper response to British actions as new groups were drawn into the protest coalition.

REVOLUTION: BEG INNINGS A second round in the struggle began in 1767 with

the British decision to pursue the Townshend duties on items such as paper, glass, lead, painters' colors, and tea. The American argument against this so-called external tax was best summed up in John Dickinson's "Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies," which appeared

serially in newspapers and then was widely published as a pamphlet. This time the American response took the form of nonimportation agreements. While they began with merchants in the leading port cities, they would not have been effective had not a large segment of the population participated. In fact, before the British capitulation in 1770, it i s clear that the initiative in enforcing such agreements was increasingly taken by organizations of artisans and mechanics which formed the backbone of the popular protests, led by leaders such as Samuel Adams, Alexander MacDougall, Charles Thomson, and Chris- topher Gadsden.

In a very real sense, however, the Americans were already beginning to fashion a new paradigm. Samuel Adams later admitted that it was about 1768 when the possibility of independence first began to take shape in his thinking, But as Merrill Jensen has noted, some of the leaders used terms such as "citizen," "commonwealth," and "independence" only after they had long been found in anonymous articles and letters in American newspapers. Certainly the colo- nies were far from united on any alternative and were relieved a t the lull after 1770. Many had disliked the infringement on the market and on property rights that had been a part of public pressure brought to bear in the economic boycotts.

But things were not completely quiet during 1770 and after. There were the Boston "Massacre," contin- uing tensions between American smugglers and the British navy and customs commissioners, and efforts by the British to take away from the Americans the power of purse to pay various governmental salaries, as well as much of the court system, as American juries refused to convict on cases involving smuggling. A major result of these continuing problems was that the Americans extended formal Committees of Corre- spondence to facilitate communication between the various colonies with respect to the latest British actions and how best to respond to them.

It is significant that the action that initiated the final crisis-the Tea Act-was intimately connected with the struggle between inequality and equality of opportunity and before the law. The ultimate form of economic inequality is monopoly, which, as the most consistent of the Austrian School of economists, Murray Rothbard, has argued, can only be maintained by State intervention. The Tea Act was a mercantilist effort to aid that gross example of inefficiency and monopoly mercantiIism,'the East India Company.

Boston's Tea Party was the extreme form of protest that shook all four of the major port cities. The public sentiment behind the Tea Party was evident in the inability of the British to find out the identity of the "Indians" who had carried out the raid. (The Indians were careful, by the way, to replace some property that was damaged by mistake, housed as it was in a chest resembling those holding the tea.)

When the British resDonded with what the Ameri-

' 34 reason july 1976

cans came to call the "Intolerable Acts,'' the Ameri- cans reacted in two ways. Most directly, there was a massive outpouring of aid to Massachusetts, sent in through Salem and elsewhere, since Boston's port had been closed. British attempts to reduce Massachusetts to a conquered province made it clear to every colony that the government could a t any time inflict such punishment on them as well. The second reaction, ironically at-the pressure of some of the conserva- tives, who feared some more precipitous action, was the calling of a Continental Congress.

RADICALS GAIN STRENGTH The proceedings of the Congress demonstrated the

growing strength of those Americans who refused to back down in the face of British coercion. The conservative Joseph Galloway's plan for reconcilia- tion failed to pass, while the Congress initiated an Association to enforce a boycott of British goods.

In any successful revolution, however, the key factor is the shift in values that takes place long before any fighting, and i t was that process to which John Adams referred when he said that "the revolu- tion was in the mind and hearts of the people and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before hostilities commenced." As Richard Henry Lee, among others, pointed out in the Congress, while custom, colonial charters, and the British Constitution all were a part of the American argument, in the final analysis it rested upon the idea of natural law.

At the same time, the Americans were coming to reject any notion of the divine right of kings. Jokes about the King became commonplace among the people, a sure sign of the loss of legitimacy, Over a year later Thomas Paine, in his bestselling pamphlet Common Sense, was to capture the essence of American thinking: "A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. I t certainly hath no divinity in it."

It was not, of course, until July 1776 that enough of the more conservative delegates in the Congress, under growing popular pressures, would consent to a Declaration of Independence as the logical culmina- tion of a protest movement that had not impressed upon the British government the slightest recognition that the Americans had any rights whatsoever. Thomas Jefferson's comment about the Declaration, that great natural law statement, made years later, is worth citing:

When forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declarati,on of Independ- ence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before;

- but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject,' in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we [were] compelled to take. Neither aiming a t originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and the spirit called for by the occasion.

But the actions of the Americans in late 1774 and early 1775, even before the fighting that broke out a t Lexington and Concord on April 19, is the best evidence that the British government had lost i t s legitimacy in the eyes of Americans long before it was officially recognized. Operating through local and state committees right up to the Congress, the Association moved to set up what the French in Vietnam would later call "parallel hierarchies," that is, an alternate governmental system reflecting the will of the great majority of the people. Almost intuitively the Americans understood that they could never be beaten i f the revolutionary committees continued to function as the, legitimate representa-

The protest movement had not impressed upon the British the slightest recognition that the Americans had any rights

whatsoever.

tives of the people and in concert with a militia whose primary task it was to keep order in their locale.

Though British commanders such as General Thomas Gage later came to realize that they faced an entire, aroused country, Gage a t first took the lack of American protest against the Intolerable Acts as a sign that they would be accepted. This was a complete misreading of the situation. People no longer bother to protest against institutions that they have rejected as illegitimate. The Americans were too busy setting up a militia, a government, and the apparatus to feed Massachusetts to bother much with further protests. Authority, without legitimacy, is reduced to the use of naked force. And that was all the British had left by 1775. The American response to British actions was a magnificient example of what I have referred to as "intersticism" (REASON, June 1975).

PEOPLE'S WAR The essence of people's war is ideological. If a true

social revolution were anything less than the over- whelming mass of a society shifting the basis of legitimacy, the society would simply fragment. The essence of leadership is found in the two-way

july 1976 reason 35

relationship and dialogue between the leaders and the larger mass of the people as the former articulate that shift in thinking. Once that shift has occurred, there is an opportunity for the leadership, operating within the broad parameters of that new legitimacy, which is necessarily abstract, to direct policy on some spetific issues in ways that may not reflect the thinking of the majority of the people. I f they transgress those parameters, as happened in Russia after 1917, they may, in fact, literally "gut" the revolution and bring it to a grinding halt.

In emphasizing, however, that mass of Americans which shifted the basis of i t s view of legitimacy, joined in protest and economic boycott against the British, fought to defend i t s rights and property, and eventually proclaimed i t s independence, I do not wish to obscure some of the differences within that revolutionary coalition. One cleavage, as noted earli- er, focused around equality, as I have defined it, as opposed to egalitarianism. Some wanted a national power, while others hoped to see government, to the extent it existed, essentially a t the state or local level. Finally, to oversimplify for the sake of brevity, an important division existed between those who desired a republic and those who wanted an empire. Given

Expansionist dreams of empire o fen took precedence over the idea of a

people's war of self-defense.

those variables, all kinds of combinations were possible. The American Revolution might be termed "an anticolonial, civil, expansionist, people's war." The "hooker," in that it contradicted the other three factors and therefore prevented their speedier realiza- tion, was the "expansionist" aspect of the war.

John Adams was one American who worried about empire, characterized by arbitrary, centralized gov- ernment, as a recurring phenomenon in history. On the other hand, Americans such as Benjamin Franklin gloried in the idea of "this rising American Empire." Adams was understandably upset about the consist- ency and aims of a war effort that, with the British trapped in Boston late in 1775, did not organize to push them into the sea but wasted i t s manpower on what proved to be a disastrous expansionist adventure in Canada. To be sure, there was a British and Indian threat along the frontier, but the American response in the case of expeditions, such as that of George Rogers Clark, would seem to indicate that expansion- i s t dreams of empire of took precedence over the idea of a people's war of self-defense. Those Americans who believe that the, debate over whether this nation should be a republic or an empire-and it cannot be both in the long run-erupted in the 1960's, or even the 1890 '~~ are simply mistaken. That fatal contradic-

tion was there from the beginning. One of the most important indications of the

enormous popular support for the war can be seen in the Americans' ability to control the countryside through committees and militia, to fight the British, Hessians and Tories in a traditional and guerrilla war, to battle the English Navy a t sea, and even to engage in some expansionist adventures in Canada and the West. I t took some time for American leaders to grasp the essentials of guerrilla war, and Washington, despite his magnificent qualities as a leader, never quite adapted to that idea. But Nathaniel Greene, and especially Daniel Morgan, Francis Marion, and Andrew Pickens, was the equal of any of the great guerrilla or partisan warfare leaders in military his- tory. The war also had a way of weeding out commanders who owed their positions to status- inequality or had been elected for their popularity by fellow members of the militia. It took time, and some defeats, but the leaders who finally emerged were those who, given the opportunity, had been able to produce victories.

Leaders such as Washington were constantly down- grading the militia, but the truth is, when used properly and with imagination, the militia fought well. They were intelligent enough to see l i t t le sense to the "stand up and fire a t the other guy" tactic that characterized warfare then, and. like any other troops they would scatter under an enormous artillery barrage, but in the end they made the difference. Like guerrilla fighters through the ages, the Ameri- cans often went back to their farms, but they always returned to fight again, or as General Greene put it, "We fight, get beat, and rise to fight again." And, as the military historian John Shy has observed: "The militia never failed in a real emergency. . . . From the British viewpoint, the militia was the virtually inex- haustible reservoir of rebel military manpower, and it was also the sand in the gears of the Qacification machine. "

IN BRITISH EYES The British never understood that the Tory-Loyal-

ists were only about one-sixth of the population, and that number shrank in the face of British atrocities and depredations as the war dragged on. Thus the American leader Andrew Pickens originally signed a loyalty oath but joined the conflict after the British destroyed his property. The Americans also practiced terror on the Tories, i f "coercive persuasion" failed to carry the day, but it was strategic and selective, never threatening American legitimacy, whereas British reprisals against the population, the worst usually by Tories, were random and without real purpose.

The youth of the American troops was an indica- tion of the widespread participation of a male population that only averaged sixteen years of age. Washington, the commander in chief, was only 43, his aide, Hamilton, a mere 20, but these were old men compared to many in the army. Andrew Jackson was

36 reason july 1976

only 14 when wounded; the first atrocity of the war was probably committed by a 12-year-old as the wounded British tried to retreat from Concord; and even Americans a t first made fun of the youth of "Swamp Fox" Marion's band of fighters. British political generals might initially make fun of the Americans and talk of quickly ending the war to return home soon, but the British who had to face the young Americans in the field found little to make fun of.

In America, the British soon learned that they faced a nation in arms against them. They knew this was true in New England and never dared a land campaign there after Lexington, Concord, or Breed's Hill, and soon even abandoned their enclave in Boston. It was in the middle colonies that British sympathy was supposedly strongest, and until late in the war some British commanders continued to hold to the myth of a vast Tory uprising should the army venture out to help them. In the face of that pipe dream was the reality of the American militia swarming around General Burgoyne's forces a t Sara- toga, and the fact that even in Pennsylvania it took over 3,000 British troops to guard the 15 miles of road over which supply wagons traveled from Chester to Philadelphia, and even then many fell victim to America militia. Late in the war, when the Hessians ventured out from New York to link up with these nonexistent Tory legions, they found themselves under constant harassment by the militia in New Jersey and quickly retreated to their enclave. Finally, we know what happened to General Cornwallis's forces a t the conclusion of his costly campaign in the South,

GUERRILLA WAR The British won many of the major battles-they

could never win the war. The real story of the war was the continual harassment the Americans inflicted, much of which did not, and never will, make the history books. The great British problem was morale, as the English military historian Eric Robson sug- gested several decades ago. In typical guerrilla fashion the Americans would quickly attack and then retreat. The British seldom ventured out after dark in less than battalion strength, and the Americans knew their movements. As early as February 1777, Captain James Murray described "a pretty amusement known by the name of foraging or fighting for our daily bread. As the rascals are skulking about the whole country, it i s impossible to move with any degree of safety without a pretty large escort." And, as Robson concluded, "continual harassment is worse than occasional large-scale actions to men whose morale is deteriorating."

It was not only that the British found themselves in a country that was hostile to them outside their enclave in New York City. There was a strong antiwar movement back in England, which, in the long run, was also important. Some of the best men in the

army and navy refused to serve against the Ameri- cans, and that was one factor in the disastrous decision to hire Hessians to fight in America.

Once there had been a shift in legitimacy, the American rejection of the British peace offerings of 1778, which might have made some sense if offered many years before, was predictable. In fact, it was foreseen by a Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith, who was one of the intellectuals belatedly consulted by the government that year, and whose memorandum on the options, from his libertarian perspective, was probably not much heeded or appreciated.

In the end, there was only one debate possible within the high councils of the British military: whether to initiate a really bloody war of attrition and reprisal against the hostile Americans on the assumption that this was the way to halt a "domino effect," lest any of the other 17 British colonies in the New World become infected with the republican virus that had affected 13 of them. After all, a counterinsurgency policy that killed enough Ameri- cans could convince other colonists it wai better t o be alive than free, It i s a lasting credit to the British that they rejected that formula, f i t only for fanatics who had completely lost sight of the goal for which they once strove, which was, after all, to win back the hearts and minds of the American people.

That rejection was well described by a young officer, Colonel Charles Stuart, who doubted the capacity of the British to wage such a war of violent

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july 1976 reason 37

attrition and worried what i ts effects might be upon the men who were asked to carry out "a war of ravage and destruction" when it was clear that no "acts of severity will cause these people to submit," though the army had already inflicted "every species of barbarity" with no other result than to plant "an irrecoverable hatred'' in the mind of every American.

ABOUT THE REVOLUTION It i s very difficult to break off this narrative and

analysis, which I also found hard to confine to a small book. There are, however, several interrelated points that I should like to make about the revolution and the war.

The first is that, despite the fact that the means by which the American Revolution progressed were not so very different from revolutionary struggles of the past and of this century as some Americans have a t times imagined, it was a very different and radical revolution in i t s ends, That legitimacy shift toward natural law, republicanism, and sovereignty of the people was something very new, and the Americans of that era realized it and were justly proud of the fact.

Secondly, it was the one great revolution in history

It was the one great revolution in history in which the idea of equality

triumphed .

in which the idea of equality triumphed over. either an accommodation with the inequalities of the old order, or radical egalitarianism. There is ample evi- dence that egalitarianism lurked just beneath the surface, ready to explode. Though there is not space to explore this complex issue here, a realization of the fact was perhaps the central motive of those, who were essentially equalitarians, who finally pushed for the adoption of the Constitution. The key to under- standing that is to look neither a t the nationalists of 1776, who remained so in 1787, nor a t the confedera- tionists, who were consistently so over those 1 1 years, but a t those leaders in the middle, who shifted. to a position advocating a national government.

They did so reluctantly, not so much to protect their property in the narrow sense, but because they saw a "newer" type of popular, egalitarian political leader coming to power a t the local and state levels who found in government the key to his fortune. They saw in a national government a means of checking that kind of egalitarianism. What they accomplished was to postpone i t s reemergence as a force to be reckoned with for almost 40 years. But it did return, for the Jacksonian movement was com- posed of an incredibly unstable coalition of equali- tarians, egalitarians, and even slaveholders, who

wanted inequality. A good clue t o the equality versus egalitarian nature of the conflict in 1787-89 is that the Federalist meetings invariably selected their best men to represent them in conventions, while the egalitarian-envy destructiveness of the Anti-Federal- ists often led them to choose their less able repre- sentatives.

Thirdly, the chance for a unique American equality owes an enormous debt to the British, who chose not to pursue a long, drawn-out war of counterinsurgency attrition, unlike the total warriors of the 20th century. R. R . Palmer is the only one, to my knowledge, to speculate, even though briefly, on what America might be like had the British attempt- ed to pursue that alternative, The Americans would have won that much longer, bloody encounter also, and, as Page Smith notes, the French alliance was more an obstacle, despite Yorktown, than an advan- tage. But as Palmer suggests, the American society that emerged from such a conflict would have been much different. I believe it would have been more statist, egalitarian, and intolerantly nationalistic, much like many of the societies of the 20th century that have been pushed in that direction, even more than might otherwise have been the case, by con- tinued Western, often American, intervention. Imagine the degree of militarism that would have characterized American society, one in which the young boys would have spent much of their lives in a war of atrocity against the British. They most certainly would not have put much of a premium on human life, and, how would they have felt about liberty?

Finally, the debate over a republic versus an empire i s not new, but goes back to the birth of the nation. Our present antirevolutionary posture is but one indication of the progress of the imperial half of that unstable equation.

What then, can this generation of Americans learn from that people's war of two hundred years ago? First, we must kindle the desire for equality of opportunity and before the law in our own society to counter the present push toward either inequality or egalitarianism, which, ironically, with i t s socialist elite, ends up being a new kind of inequality. Secondly, equality is best fostered by severely limit- ing the power of government and by the free market, not by a schooling system with pieces of paper (degrees) so dear to American mandarin intellectuals since Jefferson, who was himself something of a Confucian. Thirdly, we must eliminate, once and for all, that imperial quest for power that has repeatedly contradicted the desire for a republic based on liberty and law. Finally, intervening in other revolutions, whether because of that imperial thrust or with the best of intentions, where the push for equality is very weak a t best in the fight against feudal inequality, can only result in a more rapid victory for egalitarianism.

Let us strive not for the power of the Great So- ciety, but for the creativity of the Good Society.

july 1976 38 reason

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD With the beginning of the American Revolutionary

War a t the outbreak of Lexington and Concord, two truths about the Revolution already stand out clearly. One is that the Revolution was genuinely and enthusiastically supported by the great majority of the American population. It was a true people's war against British rule. The American rebels could certainly not have concluded the first successful war of national liberation in history, a war against the world's greatest naval and military power, unless they had commanded the support of the American people. As David Ramsay, the first great historian of the American Revolution, put it in 1789: "The War was the people's war . , . the exertions of the army would have been insufficient to effect the revolution, unless the great body of the people had been prepared for it, and also kept in a constant disposition to oppose Great Britain. "[For a discussion of the Revolution as

Murray Rothbard, whose Viewpoint column appears every third month in REASON, is professor of economics at the Polytechnic Institute of New York. He is the author of numerous books and articles. The following is adapted from a chapter in volume 3 of his multivolume, in-progress history of America, Conceived in Liberty.

Libertam Revolution

a majority movement, see the article in this issue by William Marina - Ed.]

A second truth that emerges is the egregious fallacy of the view endemic among historians of all ideologi- cal persuasions that there is a large and necessary dichotomy between political or moral principle and economic self-interest. Historians friendly to the Revolution have insisted that the Americans fought for political freedom, for independence, for constitu- tional rights, or for democracy; critical historians maintain that the fight was merely for economic reasons, for defense of property and trade against British interference. But why must the two be sundered? Why may not a defense of American liberty and property, of political and economic rights be conjoined? The merchants rebelling against the stamp tax, or sugar or tea taxes, or restrictions of the Navigation Laws, were battling for their rights of property and trade free from interference. In doing so, they were battling for their own property and for the rights of liberty a t the same time. The American masses, similarly, were battling for all property rights, for their own as well as those of the merchants, and acting also in their capacity as consumers fighting against British taxes and restrictions.

In reality there need be no dichotomy between

july 1976 reason 39

liberty and property, between defense of the rights of property in one's person and in one's material possessions. Defense of rights is logically unitary in all spheres of action. And what is more, the American revolutionaries certainly acted on these very assump- tions, as revealed by their essential adherence to libertarian thought, to political and economic rights, and always to '!Liberty and Property." The men of the 18th century saw no dichotomy between personal and economic freedom, between rights to liberty and to property; these artificial distinctions were left for later ages to construct.

IDEOLOGY AND THE STATE From the conclusions that the American revolu-

tionaries commanded the loyalty of a large majority of the colonists and that they saw no dichotomy between liberty and economic rights, and therefore between ideology and economic interest, we may proceed to some broader speculations on the role of ideology as compared to economic interest in the various actions of politicial history. In particular, we contend that the primary motivations will tend to differ between two classes of political actions, be- tween actions of the State in expanding i t s power

Why may not a defense ofAmerican liberty and property, of political and

economic rights, be conjoined?

over the populace and actions of the populace in moving or rebelling against State power. We contend that the actions of the former will tend to be primarily motivated by economic interest, while the latter will tend to be primarily motivated by more abstract ideological or moral concerns.

Let us see why this should be so. The essence of the State through history is a minority of the population, constituting a power elite or a "ruling class," governing and living off of the majority, or the "ruled." Since a majority cannot live parasitically off a minority without the economy and the social system breaking down very quickly, and since the majority can never act permanently by itself but must always be led by an oligarchy, every State will subsist by plundering the majority on behalf of a ruling minority. A further or corollary reason for the inevitability of minority rule is the pervasive fact of the division of labor: the majority of the public must spend most of i t s time going about the business of making a daily living. Hence the actual rule of the State must be left to full-time professionals who are necessarily a minority of the society.

Throughout history, then, the State has consisted of a minority plundering and tyrannizing over a

majority. This brings us to the great question, the great mystery, of politiqal philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. From Etienne de La Bobtie to David Hume to Ludwig von Mises, political philosophers have shown that no State-no minority-can continue long in power unless supported, even i f passively, by the majority. Why then do the majority continue to accept or support the State when they are clearly acquiescing in their own subjection? Why do the majority continue to obey the minority?

Here we arrive a t the age-old role of the intellectu- als, the opinion-molding groups in society. The ruling class-be they warlords, nobles, bureaucrats, feudal landlords, monopoly merchants, or a coalition of several of these groups-must employ intellectuals to convince the majority of the public that their rule is beneficent, inevitable, necessary, and even divine. The leading role of the intellectual through history is that of the Court Intellectual, who in return for a share, a junior partnership, in the power and pelf offered by the rest of the ruling class, spins the apologies for State rule with which to convince a misguided public. This is the age-old alliance of Church and State, of Throne and Altar, with the Church in modern times being largely replaced by secular intellectuals and "scientific" technocrats.

When State rulers act, then, to use and aggrandize State power, their primary motivation is economic: to increase their plunder a t the expense of the subject and the taxpayer. The ideology that they profess and that is formulated and spread through society by the Court Intellectuals is an elaborate rationalization for their economic interests. The ideology i s the camou- flage for their loot, the fictitious clothes spun by the intellectuals to hide the naked plunder by the Emperor. The economic motive behind the ideologi- cal garb of the State is, then, the heart of the issue.

ANTISTATISTS' PREOCCUPATIONS But what of rebellions against State power-those

infrequent but vital situations in history when the subjects rise up to diminish, whittle away, or abolish State power? What, in short, of such great events as the American Revolution or the classical liberal movements of the 17th and 18th centuries? Of course, an economic motive exists here too, in this case that of defending the private property of the subjects from the depredations of the State. But our contention here is that, even when conjoined as in the American Revolution, the major motive of the opposition, or of the revolutionaries, will be ideologi- cal rather than economic.

The basic reason for this assertion is that the ruling class, being small and largely specialized, is motivated to think about i t s economic interests 24 hours a day. The manufacturers seeking a tariff, merchants seeking to cripple their competition, bankers looking for taxes to repay their government bonds, rulers seeking a strong State from which to acquire revenue, bureaucrats wishing to expand their empire, are al l

40 reason july 1976

professionals in statism. They are constantly a t work trying to preserve and expand their privileges. Hence the primacy of the economic motive in their actions.

But the majority has allowed itself to be misled largely because i t s immediate interests are generally diffuse and hard to observe, and because they are not professional "antistatists" but people going about their business of daily living. What can the average person know of the arcane processes of subsidy or taxation or bond issue? Generally he is too wrapped up in his daily life, too habituated to his lot after centuries of State-guided propaganda, to give any thought to his unfortunate fate. Hence, an oppostion or revolutionary movement, or indeed any mass movement from below, cannot be primarily guided by ordinary economic motives. For such a mass movement to form, the masses must be fired up, must be aroused to a rare and uncommon pitch of fervor against the existing system. But that requires an ideology. Only ideology, guided either by a new religious conversion or by a passion for justice, can arouse the interest of the masses (in the current jargon, "raise their consciousness") and lead them out of the morass of daily habit into an uncommon and militant activity in opposition to the State.

This is not to say that an economic motive-for example, defense of their property-does not play an important role. But to form a mass movement in opposition means that they must shake off the habits, the daily mundane concerns of several lifetimes, and become politically aroused and determined as never before in their lives. Only a commonly held and passionately believed-in ideology can perform that role. Hence our conclusion that a mass movement such as the American Revolution must have been centrally motivated by a commonly shared ideology,

IDEOLOGY FOR THE MASSES How then do the masses of subjects acquire this

guiding and determining ideology? By the very nature of the masses, it is impossible for them to arrive a t such an opposition or revolutionary ideology on their own. Habituated as they are to their narrow and daily rounds, uninterested in ideology as they normally are, it i s impossible for the masses to l i f t themselves up by their own bootstraps to hammer out an ideological movement in opposition to the existing State. Here we arrive a t the vital role of the intellectuals. It is only intellectuals, the full-time (or largely full-time) professionals in ideas, who have either the time, the ability, or the inclination to formulate an opposition ideology and then to spread the word to the mass of the subjects. In contrast t o the stat ist Court Intellec- tual, whose role is a junior partner in rationalizing the economic interests of the ruling class, the radical or opposition intellectual's role is the centrally guiding one of formulating the opposition or revolutionary ideology and then spreading the ideology to the masses, thereby welding them into a revolutionary move men t .

An important corollary point: in weighing the motivations of the intellectuals themselves, or even of the masses, it is generally true that setting oneself up in opposition to an existing State is a lonely, thorny, and often dangerous road. It would usually be to the direct economic interests of the radical intellectuals to "sell out," to be coopted by the ruling State apparatus. Those intellectuals who choose the radical opposition path-who pledge, in the famous words of the American revolutionaries, "their lives, their for-

The Court Intellectual spins the apologias for State rule.

tunes, and their sacred honor''-can scarcely be dominated by economic motives. On the contrary, only a fiercely held ideology, centering on a passion for justice, can keep the intellectual to the rigorous path of truth. Hence, again, the likelihood cif a dominant role for ideology in an opposition movement . ECONOMICS VS. IDEOLOGY

Thus, it turns out to be true that stat ists tend to be governed by economic motivation, with ideology serving as a smokescreen for such motives, while libertarians or antistatists are ruled principally and centrally by ideology, with economic defense playing a subordinate role. Through this dichotomy we may a t last resolve the age-old historiographical dispute over whether ideology or economic interests play the dominant role in historical motivation.

We can now see why the Beard-Becker "economic determinist" model of human motivation, a dominant

Statists tend to be governed by

sewing as smokescreen for such motives.

* economic motivation, with ideology

school of American history in the 1920's and 19303, so fruitful and penetrating when applied to stat ist actions of the American government, fails signally when applied to the great antistatist events of the American Revolution. The Beard-Becker approach sought to apply an economic determinist framework and specifically a framework of inherent conflict between various major economic. classes, to the American Revolution. The vital flaws in the Beard- Becker model were two-fold. First, they did not

july 1976 reason 41

understand the necessarily primary role of ideas in guiding any revolutionary or opposition movement. Second, they did not understand that there are no inherent economic conflicts on the free market; without government intrusion, there is no reason for merchants, farmers, landlords, e t al. to be a t logger- heads. Conflict is only created between those classes that rule the State as against those exploited by the State. Not understanding this crucial point, the Beard-Becker historians framed their analysis in terms of the allegedly conflicting class interests of, in particular, merchants and farmers. Since the mer- chants clearly led the way in revolutionary agitation, the Beard-Becker approach was bound to conclude that the merchants, in agitating for revolution, were aggressively pushing their class interests a t the ex- pense of the deluded farmers.

EXPLAINING AWAY IDEAS But now the economic determinists were con-

fronted by a basic problem: if indeed the revolution was against the class interests of the mass of the farmers, why did the latter support the revolutionary movement? To this key question the determinists had two answers. One was the common, mistaken view

The consensus historians tried to absolve the American republic from the original sin of having been born

via revolution.

that the Revolution was only supported by a minor- i ty of the population. A second answer was that the farmers were deluded into such support by the "propaganda" beamed a t them by the upper classes. In effect, these historians transferred the analysis of the role of ideology as a rationalization of class interests from i t s proper use to explain State action to a fallacious use in trying to understand antistate mass movements. In this approach, they relied on the jejune theory of "propaganda" pervasive in the

' 1920's and 1930's under the influence of Harold Lasswell: namely, that no one sincerely holds any ideas or ideology and therefore that ideological statements cannot be taken a t face value but must be considered only as insincere rhetoric for the purposes of "propaganda." Again, the Beard-Becker school was trapped by i t s failure to give any primary role of ideas in history.

After World War II, as part of the general "Ameri- can celebration'' among the American intellectuals of that era, the newly dominant "consensus school" of American history demonstrated that the Revolution was indeed supported by the majority of the popula- tion. Unfortunately, however, under the aegis of such major consensus theoreticians as the "neoconserva-

tives" Daniel Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter, the consensus school moved to the truly absurd conclu- sion that the American Revolution, in contrast to all other revolutions in history, was not really a revolu- tion a t all, but a purely measured and conservative reflex against the restrictive measures of the Crown.

Under the spell of the American celebration and of a post-World War II hostility to all modern revolu- tions, the consensus historians were constrained to

.deny any and all conflicts in American history, whether economic or ideological, and to absolve the American republic from the original sin of having been born via revolution. Thus the consensus histori- ans were fully as hostile to ideology as a prime motive force in history as their enemies, the economic determinists. The difference is that, where the deter- minists saw class conflict, the consensus school maintained that the genius of Americans has always been to be unfettered by abstract ideology of any kind and that instead they have met every issue as ad hoc, problem-solving pragmatists. Thus the consensus school, in i t s eagerness to deny the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution, failed to see that all revolutions against State power are necessarily radical and hence "revolutionary" acts, and further that they must be genuine mass movements guided by an informed and radical ideology.

REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY Fortunately, however, the most recent and now

dominant school of historiography on the American Revolution-that of Professor Bernard Bailyn-brings radical ideology, and radical libertarian ideology a t

.that, into the forefront of the causes of the Revolu- tion. Against the hostility of both of the older schools of historians, Bailyn has managed, in scarcely a decade, to win his way through to become the leading interpretor of the Revolution. Bailyn's great contribution was to lay out for the first time the truly dominant role of ideology among the revolu- tionaries and to stress that, not only was the Revolution a genuine revolutionary and multiclass mass movement among the colonists, but also that it was guided and impelled, above all, by the ideology of radical libertarianism: hence what Bailyn happily calls the "transforming libertarian radicalism of the Revolution."

In a sense, Bailyn was harking back to an older generation of historians a t the turn of the 20th century, the so-called Constitutionalists, who had also stressed the dominant role of ideas in the revolution- ary movement. But Bailyn correctly saw that the mistake of the Constitutionalists was in ascribing the central and guiding role to sober and measured legalistic arguments about the British Constitution, and, secondarily, to John Locke's philosophy of natural rights and the right of revolution. Bailyn saw that this interpretation missed the major motive power of the Revolutionaries: Constitutional legal- isms, as later critics pointed out, were dry-as-dust

42 reason july 1976

arguments that hardly strimulated the requisite revo- lutionary passions and, furthermore, neglected the important problem of the economic depredations by Great Britain, while Locke's philosophy, though ultimately highly important, was too abstract to generate the passions or to stimulate widespread reading by the bulk of the colonists. Something, Bailyn rightly felt, was missing: the intermediate-level ideology that could stimulate revolutionary passions.

Bailyn found that missing ingredient in the radical libertarian Lockean English writers of the 19th century-especially Trenchard and Gordon of "Cato's" Letters. These writers applied and trans- formed Lockean natural rights theory into a radical and passionate, and explicitly political, libertarian and anti-British framework. Trenchard and Gordon, and the other influential libertarian writers, clearly and passionately set forth the libertarian theory of natural rights, went on to point out that government in general, and the British government specifically, was the great violator of such rights, and warned also that Power-government-stood ever ready to con- spire to violate the liberties of the individual. To stop this crippling and destructive invasion of Liberty by Power, the people must be ever wary, ever vigilant, ever alert to the conspiracies by the rulers to expand their power and aggress against their subjects. It was this spirit that the American colonists eagerly im-

bibed and that accounted for their "conspiracy view" of the English government, a view that such historians as Bernhard Knollenberg have shown was basically correct, since, after 1760, such conspiracies were all too real. Thus, what some historians have derided as the "paranoia" of the colonists turns out to be not paranoia a t all but an insightful apprehension of reality, an insight that was of course fueled by the colonists' libertarian understanding of the very nature and essence of state power itself.

Thus, in the deepest sense, the American Revolu- tion was a conscious majority revolution on behalf of libertarianism and against Power, a libertarian ideolo- gy that stressed the conjoined rights of "Liberty and Property." The American Revolution was not only the first great modern revolution, it was a libertarian revolution as well. (For a further elaboration of this thesis, see Murray N. Rothbard, "Economic Deter- minism, Ideology, and the American Revolution," Libertarian Forum [Nov. 19741, pp. 4-7. Also see Rothbard, "The American Revolution Reconsid- ered," Books for Libertarians (July 1974), pp. 6-8. For a summary of Bailyn's views, see Bernard Bailyn, "The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation," in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution [Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 19731, pp. 3-31 .)

SMITH INTERVIEW (continued from page 211 commerce of America naturally seemed to be an acquisition of the highest value. To the undiscerning eye of giddy ambition, it naturally presented itself amidst the confused scramble of politics and war as a very dazzling object to fight for. The dazzling splendor of the object, however, the immense great- ness of the commerce, is the very quality which renders the monopoly of it hurtful. And to prohibit a great people from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind. Such prohibitions were impertinent badges of slavery imposed upon them.

REASON: Would you agree with the assessment that colonial or imperial ventures are inspired by business interests?

SMITH: Well, yes and no. To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may a t first sight appear a project f i t only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers. Such statesmen, and such statesmen only, are capable of fancying that they will find some advantage in employing the blood and

treasure of their fellow citizens to found and main- tain such an empire.

REASON: As you wrote your book, events were leading rapidly into the American Revolution. Upon the occasion of our Bicentennial, could you take yourself back two centuries and give us your view from there?

SMITH: Unless some method is fallen upon of preserving the importance and of gratifying the ambition of the leading men of America, it is not very probable that they will ever voluntarily submit to us. They are very weak who flatter themselves that, in the state to which things have come, our colonies will be easily conquered by force alone, The persons who now govern the resolutions of what they call their continental congress felt in themselves a t this moment a degree of importance which perhaps the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel. From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attorneys they are become statesmen and legislators and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.

REASON: And on that note I think we will close. Thank you, Dr. Smith. You've been a most delightful guest. Ci3

july 1976 reason 43